FATE Magazine
Sep 26, 202214 min
Submitted by Cynthia Butler
I’m a baby boomer, raised during the 1950s when horror and science fiction reigned supreme at the Saturday movie matinee. Never at any time did I believe that flying saucers, or UFOs as they came to be called, existed in the realm of reality. They were simply good Entertainment: a step above cartoons. In the late 1960s we watched Star Trek and Project Blue Book on television. It was watching Project Blue Book that first made me aware that people believed UFOs were factual, that people believed they were visiting earth from other worlds. It was also watching Project Blue Book that taught me what people took for
UFOs were usually natural phenomena such as the planet Venus when it is very close and low in the sky. I understood everything that was said and firmly believed the government was correct. UFOs as reality were nonsense.
In February 1974 my husband, infant son, and I were driving home from a friend’s house after an evening of cards. While standing in the kitchen pulling my coat on I looked at the clock. It was precisely 1:00 a.m. I was amazed. My husband is a very early riser and usually hits the sack by 9:30 every night. Our friends live in south Renton, Washington, which was a twenty-minute drive to our home in Covington. My husband was driving, our son was sleeping in his car bed in the back seat, and I was leaning against the passenger door window looking up at the sky. It was a very cold crisp clear night. The stars were incredibly bright and clear. When we’d been driving about ten minutes we drove past an old farmhouse that had a line of trees as a windbreak along their driveway.
When we got past the line of trees, there, just hovering about ten feet off the ground next to the farmhouse, was a UFO. It was about 30 feet long, metallic gray; there was a line or seam its full length half way up with airliner-like windows in a row down its length above this line. There were no running lights at all. From the side it was completely dark.
I was a bit frightened when it started following us. It wasn’t following actually; it paced us and kept up our exact speed. As we drove along it came closer to the car until the only way I could see it was to lean into the window looking up. It was about 30 feet above us and I could see that it was cigar shaped. Its surface was dull and nonreflective; there were no lights or light fixtures that I could see.
Feeling very knowledgeable after watching Project Blue Book I went down a checklist of things to make sure I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. I had my husband turn off the interior and exterior lights to see if it was a reflection on the glass. It wasn’t. I turned off the radio and rolled down the window to find it made virtually no sound at all. By this time I was really getting nervous so I was relieved when we stopped at the next stop sign and it kept going and went up over the hill where I could see it cross over the road at tree top height.
A few minutes later as we were coming up to the next stop sign I saw it coming down the hill towards us. Again it was about ten feet off the ground and was moving quite slowly. I could have walked and kept up with it. At the front was a windscreen that covered the entire upper half of the vehicle. Behind the windscreen was a dark, humanoid figure standing there as if at the controls, backlit by fluorescent green light. I completely lost what little hold I had on my control at that point and yelled at my husband to get us out of there. I was hysterical. We made the left hand turn with tires screaming and traveled about 50 yards up the hill and then my memory ends.
My memory resumes as we were coming up on the stop sign to cross Highway 18. That leaves out about a mile of driving. But I was now as calm as a cucumber. When we got home I put our son in his crib, entered our bedroom and looked at the bedside clock and got the shock of my life, it said 3:18 a.m. I brought this to my husband’s attention and he said I must have misread the time before we left. I didn’t misread the clock in our friend’s kitchen; it said 1:00 a.m. straight up.
The next morning I called my friend and asked her if her clock in the kitchen was working and if the time was correct. She said it was working and the time was correct. The drive that normally took 20 minutes had lasted 2 hours and 18 minutes. The part of the incident with the UFO that I consciously remember lasted about five minutes.
After that night I would wake up to strange lights in our bedroom, with the feeling that someone was in our room. All of these things were completely abnormal for me. It was a frightening and scary time.
Sixteen years later in the late fall of 1990, I got up at 3:00 a.m. to use the bathroom and from that window saw another UFO. This one was hovering over our neighbors’ home about a hundred feet away. Our bathroom window was always open and the UFO was impossible to miss. The night was dark and overcast but dry, and there was a light wind blowing. The UFO was roughly 60 feet across, completely round, and hovering in an elliptical angle over our neighbor’s home. I could clearly see a metallic ring, similar in shape and structure to that of a circus ring. There was blue flame gently wafting down from the ring, reflecting upwards. It may have been this blue flame that gave the bottom of the craft the blue gunmetal tint. It gave me the impression of an inverted gas stove burner. The only thing that was visible was this gas flaming blue ring.
Again it made virtually no sound. All I could hear was the dead leaves in the trees rattling. I thought “Gee, I should go call 911.” Then I thought “No, it would be gone by the time they get here, if they don’t write me off as a disturbed individual.” I then thought about calling the neighbors to let them know this thing was hovering over their home, but I decided that a call at three in the morning would really scare them. At this point I used the toilet, went back to bed, and immediately fell asleep—while that UFO was still hovering over our neighbors’ home!
In the morning when I remembered the incident in the night I really got upset. I couldn’t believe my irrational behavior. I very calmly and completely dismissed this obvious UFO hovering over our neighbors’ home! I stewed over it all of that day. I was really horrified by my actions. I was more upset about my behavior than I was about the UFO. As the day went on I managed to convince myself that I had been dreaming. None of it made sense, and above all I’m a rational, common-sense individual. So when my husband came home from work I laughingly told him about my “dream.”
Then I got the shock of my life while watching the news that night. They showed a video taken by a woman in Puyallup the evening before. It was the same UFO I’d seen! Someone else had gotten a video of it when it was some 16 miles southwest of us. I later saw that the television program Sightings had a picture of it that they used in their intro for the UFO segment. So they either had a copy of the video shot by the woman in Puyallup, or other people had seen it also.
On September 21, 1995, while kicked back in an outdoor hot tub on Whidbey Island, I watched what I thought at first was a very large meteor. It was bright orange in color and had a spectacular tail. I kept waiting for it to burn out, but it just kept going. It was perfectly round. I was amazed. Then it suddenly made an abrupt 90-degree turn. Meteors don’t make right-angle turns. I watched it until it was obscured from my sight by trees. Whatever it was, it must have been enormous.
On Saturday September 6, 1997, at 4:47 a.m., my husband awakened me when he got out of bed to get ready for work. While in the bathroom I noted that the constellations where incredibly clear that morning so I tripped on out onto the deck from our bedroom to view the stars. Directly in front of me, hovering just over the trees, was this incredibly colorful, brightly-lit UFO. It was beautiful! It was about 200 yards away across our little valley. It appeared to be about 30 feet across and about six feet high, though could have easily been larger. Its height was split in half by strobe intensity lights rather like a string of pearls, each able to oscillate and working independently of each other. In width it was split in half by fluorescent colors, red on the right and blue on the left. Picture a rectangle lying on its long side with a string of pearls across its width with red above and below the pearls. Now picture a block with blue above and below the pearls and set the two blocks side by side. Now you have my UFO.
It hovered over the trees for about five minutes. I couldn’t see the bottom side because our house is on the top of the hill, and the top of the trees it was hovering over are at the same level as our deck. I could see the strobe lights moving around and back and forth. It focused one of them on me. Its intensity hurt my eyes. Since the vertical blinds were only open as far as I am wide, when my husband came through our room he couldn’t see past me outside. He asked me what I was doing.
In my brain I was screaming “UFO! UFO! UFO!” But what came out of my mouth, very stiffly and calmly, was “I’m looking at lights.” He just responded “Oh,” and went on about getting ready for work. A short time later the UFO started moving very slowly to the northwest, traversing the valley. It was moving slowly enough that I could have kept up with it walking. When my view of it was blocked by my neighbors’ very large unpruned cherry tree, it suddenly changed into one very bright white light. It appeared to make a dash toward our house when this light flashed. I then regained control of my body. I ran like a mad woman to the kitchen, yelling all the way, to grab my camera and take a picture. By now it was about at 500 feet in altitude. You could clearly see its underside. It was triangular in shape. It had a large white light at each apex with one light on each edge in between. At first only the white lights were visible.
As I watched it travel forward I saw that it was in a gentle skid like it was sliding on ice. As it turned in place the blue side that I had seen before came into view making me believe that while it was hovering over the trees directly in front of me I was looking at the apex of the triangle. One of its three sides was completely dark, one was red with the string of white lights, and one side was blue with the string of white lights. I snapped off a picture as soon as I stepped onto the deck from the kitchen making sure to get the corner of the roof in
the frame for perspective.
When I had the film developed I gave them instructions to print all frames no matter what. For some reason the frame was completely black despite the flash catching the corner of the roof. So no picture. Some weeks later Whitley Strieber was on a local television program promoting his latest book on UFOs, abduction, and aliens or as he calls them, the visitors. The show is live and asks for viewers to call in with questions or comments. Since I have been haunted since 1974 about the two hours of missing time I called the show. They were going to put me on to talk with Mr. Strieber but ran out of time. A couple of hours later the producer of the show called me because she understood my fear. She gave me the name of a hypnotherapist who treats people like me with missing time. I wasn’t going to miss a chance to talk with someone who understood what I’ve been going through.
When I called her we talked for some time and made an appointment six weeks later to be regressed to find out if we could open the door of my memories to find out what actually happened that night so many years ago. Two weeks before my appointment I had an experience I’ll never forget.
I was in bed asleep and I was dreaming. The dream ran more like a movie of a romance than an actual dream sequence. Then suddenly I was in an awakened state and the dream I had been having was literally playing on my bedroom ceiling as a movie. The light of the movie on the ceiling lit the rest of the room up quite well though dimly. I could clearly see every detail of the room. I was lying flat on my back with my arms out of the covers, straight against my sides. Just like I’d been tucked in bed by mommy. The only part of my body I could move was my eyes.
Suddenly a section of the ceiling about three feet square opened and swung up into what should have been the attic but what I saw looking down at me was a being that looked rather like a praying mantis bending down over the opening. He nodded and closed the hatch.
A few seconds later the movie playing on the ceiling and my awakened state changed back into a the romance dream and I came fully awake, sat up and simply could not get back to sleep that night. That experience was just too bizarre. And it was real. That critter looking down at me from the ceiling was no dream.
I only had one session with the hypnotist. I videotaped the whole session which lasted about 50 minutes. I asked her to place a suggestion that I would remember the whole session in my conscious memory. What came out in that session is pretty much the standard abduction scenario. I was really amazed at some of the things I said though. The craft picked me up shortly after we made our left hand turn from the stop sign. My husband was in a trance. I was screaming and calling to him but he just sat there with one hand on the wheel, looking straight ahead. A very white light illuminated the car and I began rising up, right through the roof of the car, still in a seated position. I did not remember how I got into the craft. I was just suddenly in the “operating room.”
One of the first things that came out was the being who looked down on me from my bedroom ceiling was called Mr. Bill. I gave a loud chortle when saying his name going on to explain that wasn’t his real name. I had named him that when I was little because I couldn’t pronounce his real name. I had known Mr. Bill all of my life. I liked him and found him comforting—unlike the little gray guys who gave me the creeps. I got a real mechanical feel from them, or lack of feeling and emotion.
Mr. Bill gave me the impression of serious boredom, rather old and tired of repetition. We chatted for some time about nothing important. The inside of the ship was metallic, rather like brushed and molded stainless steel. One room was bright, the other dimly lit. There were no actual lighting fixtures; the light just seemed to emit from the room itself. There was a medical procedure done on me that I won’t go into. I didn’t find it traumatic; I was used to it.
When the therapist asked me where these beings came from I promptly replied without hesitation “Zeta Reticuli.” I had never heard the words before; they sounded Latin to me. My family and I tried to find some reference to this planet in my astronomy books but failed to find anything. Recently I was reading Betty and Barney Hill’s story and was shocked to find that Betty Hill said the beings that abducted them were from the same place. I had not seen the movie or read their book before this.
The majority of the session was trying to negotiate the memory block, placed there I presume by Mr. Bill. The last thing that happened involving whoever and whatever these beings are happened in July 1999. I had been on the phone talking to the friend we’d been playing cards with in 1974 before the initial abduction. She asked me if I’d seen anything new or had any more experiences with the visitors. I told her that I hadn’t and hoped fervently that they were leaving me alone now. That perhaps I had lost my usefulness to them. Anyway I hoped so. And laughing I told her at least I’d never encountered any Men in Black, or black, unmarked helicopters.
A week later while mowing the lawn in our backyard, I heard the “whomp, whomp, whomp” of a helicopter blade coming from the hill behind me. When I got the tractor turned around headed back toward the house there was a black, unmarked Chinook-type helicopter hovering over our house. I just laughed in complete irony. If I’d ever had a doubt that they know everything I do and say, they’d just proved it to me again. I didn’t wait around to watch them leave, I just went on about mowing the lawn.
I’ve had friends and family tell me they wished they could see a UFO and I always tell them no, they don’t. It complicates your life in ways you can’t even begin to imagine—especially in a situation like mine where you continue to see them over the years and it involves the rest of your family.
In August 2000 my son and his family moved into a new home. While everybody was dealing with the move I took my grandson (who was about 31 months old) to the pet store where we purchased a fish and a bowl and food for it. It was after dark when we were headed for his new home. It was the first time I’d ever had him in my car after dark and thusly with the dash lights on.
“Gramma, the lights look like the front of our helicopter we go riding in,” he said suddenly.
I asked him what helicopter he was talking about.
“You know Gramma, the one we ride in at night.” I asked if he meant he and his parents.
“No Gramma, you know, me and you!”
He was quite certain I should know exactly what he was talking about. He went on to explain me and him riding around in a “red” helicopter in the middle of the night, when Mommy and Daddy are asleep.
I was perfectly happy to write this off as a child’s wild imagination until Thanksgiving Day that year. The kids were over for the holiday and my grandson was “helping” me cook. He started talking about the red helicopter again only this time he added some new detail. He kept talking about “those kids with the big scary eyes.” I was trying not to encourage him, or place too much concern but he just kept going on and on about those “big scary eyes.” He also stated that they were mean. I had a talk with my son who told me that my grandson often wakes up at 3:00 a.m. screaming in hysterics and had said something previously about the big scary eyes. He still wakes screaming at 3:00.
I have lived a life of high strangeness, including missing my tonsils though I’d never had my tonsils removed. My ear, nose and, throat doctor said I must have just forgotten the operation. My mother confirmed I’d never had my tonsils removed. Both of my sons have had their tonsils removed in the conventional way, and it’s not something any of us will forget. It’s a miserable experience at best.
After the 1990 sighting I started doing research on the UFO phenomenon. I decided there had to be a lot more to it than what our government was willing to tell us, which doesn’t amount to much. I reported my sightings to the National UFO Reporting Center here in Seattle in 1996.
It was at this time that our mail suddenly became a problem. After having lived there for ten years we couldn’t get our mail. We even received a card from Fate telling us there was a problem getting my magazine to me. The library kept changing our address out of nowhere. The post office was sending our bills back to the sender. I called the post office three times and mailed four letters to them. The only answer they could give me was it was simply not possible. Our mail situation did not get straightened out until we moved in 2000.
Last year I read John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies where he goes into all the problems that befell him while he was doing research and I began to understand. John Keel said they will drive you crazy if you let them simply because they can. I had come to that conclusion and decided I wouldn’t allow it to happen. I have reason to believe my oldest son has been abducted. He recently saw a UFO apparently being escorted by two helicopters in the Kent area, and has had several other sightings that began for him around 1990. My grandson still occasionally wakes up screaming about the people with the huge ugly eyes. He hasn’t mentioned any of our night flights for a while. He is very angry about it. They have things going bump in the night in their apartment and other strange phenomenon. We all center our lives on the mundane and
normal and remain sane.